


A Voice Like a Ghost

by ckret2



Category: Hazbin Hotel (Web Series)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Childhood, Clairvoyance, Gen, Ghosts, Paranormal, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:40:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27999900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckret2/pseuds/ckret2
Summary: Alastor’s mother has known since he was a baby that he’s sensitive to the other side. He’s always heard things nobody else can hear.She’s so afraid it’s because her little boy is already halfway to the grave.
Relationships: Alastor & Alastor's Mother (Hazbin Hotel)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 92





	A Voice Like a Ghost

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who’s been listening to a ghost story podcast!!! It’s me!

There was no sound, no movement from Alastor’s cradle; but something tugged her back from the brink of sleep and prompted her to sit up and check on her baby boy.

Alastor was awake, moonlight shining on his wide open eyes, staring up calmly at the ceiling. She followed his gaze up. Nothing up there but shadows.

She looked at Alastor again. He was smiling, the way he always smiled when he heard someone's voice.

The hairs prickled on her arms.

People on her mother's side of the family—usually the women, but not exclusively—were sensitive to things most normal folks couldn't detect. She herself was barely sensitive; she rarely sensed more than vague emotions, fleeting impressions. Meanwhile, her sweet little Ally wasn't even old enough to talk yet, but as long as his face had been coordinated enough to smile and his arms strong enough to reach out, he'd been smiling at and reaching for people who weren't there. It must have skipped a generation.

She’d known he’d be sensitive before he was born; while she was pregnant, she’d heard a strange man singing—but his voice had a metallic echo like he was singing into an iron bucket, a sound like crinkling paper or pattering rain underneath. The voice sounded faintly like Alastor’s father’s—she’d wondered if some paternal ancestor had come to sing to his newest descendant—but the accent was nasally and Northern, not French. The singing stopped when Alastor was born.

Or at least, she’d stopped hearing it.

As she watched, Alastor started clapping—his soft palms patting each other would have been inaudible if the room weren't so silent. It wasn’t a spontaneous applause of excitement but the steady, rhythmic clapping he'd already learned to do whenever someone played music.

She leaned out of bed, reaching for the edge of his cradle, and whispered, "What do you hear, Ally baby?"

His clapping stopped and his smile disappeared as he twisted to look at his mother. He made a distressed sound that wasn't quite a sob, more a soft " _humph._ "

"Ohhh." She gently scooped Alastor out of his cradle and sat back in bed with him. "I'm so sorry, darling, did I scare away your music?"

"Mm!"

"Shh, it's alright. Mama will sing for you instead." She brushed aside a wisp of wavy brown hair to kiss his forehead, then rocked him in her arms as she quietly sang him a lullaby.

As she did, her gaze roved around the room, wondering who had been singing to her baby.

###

One night, when he was about a year older, she was stirred from her sleep by the sound of spectral footsteps skittering back and forth in the hallway, soft but insistent, lasting far longer than typical apparitions in this house. Alastor, breathing steadily beside her in his sleep, never stirred. Over several minutes, she'd mustered up her courage, slid out of bed, and opened the door to ask the spirit to let her rest.

For a moment, she saw nothing; and then she saw the silhouette of a child moving in the hallway, a small specter half blended into the shadows, eyes glowing white and wild, more clear than any spirit she’d ever seen before. It took her a long, terrified moment to recognize the ghost as her own child, his eyes rolled up and glinting white in the dull moonlight spilling from the bedroom—sleepwalking. She had to turn to stare at the spot in her bed where she'd been sure her child had been curled up asleep to confirm that he wasn't really there, and then she scooped him up and carried him back into the bedroom with her.

She wondered what had been breathing next to her.

And months later, while visiting her uncle's house, the oil lamp near the bookcase had started to flicker wildly, as if somebody was blowing heavily on it, the way it often did even when no one was near it; Alastor had watched it closely, then hopped off of his seat, searched through the bookcase, pulled out a heavy Bible almost too big for him, opened it up, and plopped it on the chair nearest the oil lamp.

"Granny wants her reading," he explained, matter-of-fact, as he sat again beside his mother.

Both of Alastor's grandmothers were still alive; she had no idea whose grandmother he'd been speaking to. But the oil lamp stopped flickering.

And again, months later, when they were visiting a hotel in Mississippi, she had felt a massive, malevolent presence—or a collection of many presences—something dead and sullen seeping out of the building’s many rooms, so strong it almost made her dizzy. But Alastor, so much more sensitive than her, had hopped around the lobby completely carefree, humming to himself and trying to climb over strangers' luggage any time she turned her back on him.

"Don't you think the air is heavy in here?" she asked him.

He shrugged, as if this was technically true but it didn't bother him. "They keep me from floating," he said, with a stomp on the floor as if to show how much better grounded he was. The stomp made a sharp tap too hard for his shoe.

She squeezed his hand much more tightly than usual on that trip, as if to keep him from floating away.

###

"Your father says he has an aunt who moved North after the war to be a spirit medium," she said, "so you come by it honestly on both sides of the family." Alastor’s father had divulged that bit of family lore in his latest letter; the aunt had left when he was too young to remember her clearly, and so he hadn’t thought to bring her up until he’d mentioned Alastor’s talent to an uncle and been reminded.

Alastor stopped chewing his breakfast with half a strip of bacon hanging out of his mouth, the end of it grasped in his greasy little hands. He bit off the bacon and mumbled around his mouthful, "Wha' a 'piri mebium?"

"Oh, honey." She leaned across the table with a napkin to wipe the bacon grease off his face, but before she had a chance he stubbornly stuck his bacon strip back in his mouth. She laughed and sat back. "A spirit medium is someone who talks to ghosts like you do, but they do it for money."

This explanation made no impression on him. Money was still an unknown concept. He swallowed his bacon and asked, "Can I do that?"

She took the opportunity to attack his cheeks with her napkin.

" _Mama!_ "

She smiled. "Of course you can, sweetheart. You can do anything you want." Every time he learned about something new, he asked _can I do that?_ and she'd never said no. Maybe _when you’re older_ , maybe _if you work hard_ , but never _no_. "You'd be good at it." She inspected his face and, satisfied, relinquished his cheeks and sat back.

Satisfied with this answer, Alastor picked up a spoon, squished the yolk of his egg to make it ooze out, then started uncoordinatedly stirring it in with his cornbread.

She went on, "Your father said that his aunt was always afraid of the ghosts she saw. They've never scared you, have they?"

" _No,_ Mama." He answered with the edge of impatience of someone who'd been answering this question since he was old enough to understand it.

She nodded, satisfied. "And sometimes she couldn't tell ghosts from living people. But you always can, can't you?"

He nodded deeply, his spoon bobbing in his mouth.

"How do you tell them apart?"

Alastor swallowed hard to free up his mouth. "Usually, the ghosts, they look like clouds? Or you can't see them. And they always make ghost sounds like this!" He cupped his hands over his mouth and made a drawn out " _Khhhhh!_ " sound in the back of his throat.

"Really?" she asked, amused. "That's what they sound like? All the time?"

He nodded enthusiastically. "Like this!" And he repeated the sound.

Something about it was vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t say why.

“They tell me things but their voices are funny,” Alastor went on. He shoveled bits of eggy cornbread into his mouth between sentences. “They said I’m going to be like them.”

Her heart leaped into her throat. She clapped her hand over her chest. “ _What?_ ”

“I’m going to be like them,” he repeated. “I’ll be a voice like a ghost and no body.” He looked up at her, carefully studying her face.

She probably looked terrified. She turned back to her own breakfast, scooping a piece of omelet onto her fork. “N-not—” She cleared her throat. “Not for a long time, I hope.”

He looked down at his plate, pouting. “They won’t tell me.” He sounded wistful. As if he longed to be like that, a ghost’s voice and no body.

A chill ran down her back.

When she heard him longing for a bodiless voice, she thought of how he’d looked in that long moment, over a year ago now, when she had been sure the little silhouette in the hallway was a ghost.

Not even old enough for school yet and already he was better at hearing spirits than anyone in their family. Her mother was teaching him how to communicate with their ancestors, entrusting candles and matches to his tiny hands. The local mambo had already started asking about his dreams, wondering if the loas were going to pick him out to become one of their priests.

She should be proud—she _was_ proud—but some days when the morning didn’t feel bright enough to chase away the shadows, she feared that he heard the dead so clearly because he was halfway to joining them.

###

Across Southern Louisiana, family members were crowded around their radios to listen to the broadcast out of New Orleans as their son/granson/nephew/cousin Alastor broadcast live on air for the first time; but in Alastor's own home, the only living soul listening was his mother. But who knew how many dead souls that she wasn't sensitive enough to distinguish from each other were crowded around to listen to their descendant.

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience! This is Al Mignon speaking. Tonight, we bring you some delightful musical entertainment from the Orpheus Theater in New Orleans—"

"That's that voice he's so proud of, the one he learned to do in New York," she whispered, putting a hand on the table edge of their ancestors' shrine, the way she used to put a hand on her grandmother's elbow to catch her attention when her hearing started to go. "It's how all the actors talk on Broadway." Alastor had explained that to her after rattling off a couple lines of Shakespeare in the false accent. It was how he'd gotten the job, he said; the white folks at the station liked the accent, they said the microphones picked up the clear diction more easily.

Over the radio, the accent made him sound like a stranger.

"You're in for a real treat tonight, folks—a quartet of piano works by Louis Moreau Gottschalk, all inspired by the local music of Louisiana—beginning with ‘Bamboula,’ a personal favorite of mine— _da-di-da-da dah-da-da-da—_ "

As Alastor hummed, through the radio, she heard a voice she hadn't heard in over twenty years, a voice she had all but forgotten in the decades since: the tinny-voiced man who had sung to her while she'd been pregnant with her little Ally.

She gasped, placing a hand over her heart. Just like he'd promised when he was a child. Here he was, a ghost's voice without a body, the electric sound of radio static like paper crinkling under his words.

"But I won't spoil the whole show for you," he was saying over the radio, so far away. "There, our pianist Pearl Lambert is approaching the stage—let's give her a listen..."

She hardly registered the applause or the muffled piano music that came through over the radio.

Alastor was going to be home in a few hours. He was going to hug her, and ask how he'd sounded, and hurry over to the shrine to ask whether their ancestors had been able to hear, and hustle into the kitchen to make a late dinner and a celebratory drink...

But even when he got home, she wasn't sure she would be able to shake the feeling that he was somewhere inside the radio now, and that he'd never come back out.

**Author's Note:**

> I like the idea that, among many reasons why Alastor’s so powerful in Hell, one of the things that set him on the route to power is that he had an inborn natural affinity for magic and then at some point he just sort of decided to take that talent and do evil things with it. Given that Alastor _did_ die young, and also on top of that had a connection to the afterlife (because I think he was directly dealing with Hell long before he arrived), giving him a connection to ghosts as a child is fitting.
> 
> Plus I’ve got Some Thoughts about Alastor’s relationship to family & religion—particularly how they could make a great thematic contrast to his later evildoing and are things he had to abandon to become a serial killing creep—so adding in some casual ancestor worship when he’s already got an affinity for communicating with the dead helps kick up those themes.
> 
> Posts for this fic available on [tumblr](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/637157062399475712/a-voice-like-a-ghost) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/ckret2/status/1337166396975886336?s=20). If you enjoyed the fic, comments/reblogs/retweets there are highly appreciated (as are comments here)!


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